


we're never certain how

by madelinestarr



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Drinking, Drunken Confessions, Fluff, Lem King is a jerk, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 13:19:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17509358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madelinestarr/pseuds/madelinestarr
Summary: Hella and Fero play a drinking game while Lem speaks with revolutionaries. Some things are more important than others.





	we're never certain how

**Author's Note:**

  * For [varkanum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/varkanum/gifts).



> Title is a lyric from the Weakerthan's "The Reason"
> 
> prompt: I'm extremely invested in FeroLem and have a weak spot for mutual secret pining and confessions? Maybe even inebriated confessions? My favorite thing about this pairing is the best friends to lovers dynamic, so you're welcome to exploit that. I'm good with angsty stuff as long as it has a relatively postive outcome. AUs and canon divergence are fine but I prefer that it still stay within the Hieron universe.  
> Added Hella as an option since boat party polyam is my THING and content of them getting up to some of their usual bullshit or just casually hanging out is also great and fantastic.

“Okay it’s dumb. Well it’s not dumb, it’s just not super important and I’m trying to only think of important things right now. Well, it is super important but important to me as a person and not important to us and our mission and the Lance and-”

“Okay, okay! Gods. Just tell me what happened.”

Hella had watched Fero the whole time he was yelling, which was weird. Not the action itself - people tended to keep an eye on him while he was yelling if only because he made himself as hard to ignore as possible - but nobody ever paid attention to Fero for that long. 

Fero took a deep breath in and let it out slowly, gething his thoughts.

“Oh. Okay. Uh. Lem thanked me for bringing him lunch today,” Fero said, sitting down on the chair as opposed to standing on it now.

Hella nodded, as though that was a thing that made sense in the world.

“Hadrian did that,” Hella said.

Fero tilted his head to one side. “Hadrian thanked me for bringing Lem lunch or Hadrian brought Lem lunch, because I’m pretty sure it was just Lem and me in the room, and unless Hadrian learned to turn invisible-”

“Hadrian taught Lem to say thank you when people bring him lunch.”

“What.”

Hella sighed. “Look, I get it. We stopped existing to you for eight years or whatever, but we lived in that sword. There was a town, and people, and clocks. We couldn’t fight monsters because there weren't monsters so we just like, did stuff. Were people.”

“You were... people.”

“Yeah, like, uh, Adaire opened up a store that sold food and jewelry. I built a great boat.”

Fero made a face, half because ugh boats and half because it made Hella smile when he did stuff like that.

She did smile, and continued on. “Hadrian, uh, made heart eyes with Samothes and Lem, well, he, uh, didn’t do great.”

“Didn’t do great, how?”

Hella ran a hand through her hair. “Like he, y’know, would sit in an office for more than ten hours a day reading the same book over and over again and would sleep on the wooden floor and just... wasn’t good at taking care of himself. We were remembering how to be people and it’s like… it was he was forgetting how.”

Fero nodded. “He’s never been good at taking care of himself.” 

He let the that’s why I used to do it for him stick in the back of his throat.

“Right, so I just would bring him food and water and make him sleep in a bed every day or so and then I would get dinner with Hadrian and talk about how worried about Lem I was, and so Hadrian and Lem and Samothes had some sort of lunch date and afterwards, Lem would thank me for doing stuff for him.”

“You don’t think Samothes just told him to be nicer?”

This time Hella made a face. “Samothes is kind of a dick.”

Fero laughed.

Hella smiled at him. “It’s nice to hear your laugh again.”

Fero met her eyes, feeling his cheeks flush and noticing Hella looked flushed as well.

“I, uh. Do you think they have wine here?” said Hella, standing and moving towards the low cupboard against one of the walls. “There wasn’t wine in the sword and I could like, really go for some.”

Fero nodded, hurrying away so that he didn’t have to look at Hella while he waited for his blush to go down and returning quickly with some wine.

“It’s made out of moss? And some sort of ground fruit which neither thing makes sense to me but I also don’t live here so maybe they have food that I don’t know about and I’m hoping it isn’t like, secretly the Heat and the Dark but maybe if it is, it will be like, better at getting us drunk?”

Hella took the bottle out of his hand and uncorked it without breaking eye contact with him, and took a pull straight from the bottle. Fero watched the line of her throat as she swallowed, feeling his cheeks blush again, the heat only deepening as Hella smirked. 

Fero looked at Hella’s hand around the bottle and then back to her smirk. He felt his own expression begin to mirror hers.

“Hey,” said Fero, “Do you wanna play a game?”

“A drinking game?”

“Is there any other kind of game?”

Hella hummed. “What are the terms?” 

Fero said the first thing that came into his head. “Try to think of the dumbest thing Lem can do and whoevers is less dumb has to drink.”

Hella nodded and then turned quickly, pulling another couple of bottles from her bag. “If that’s the rule, then we’re going to need them.”

They both laughed, Fero already feeling giddy from just the sound of her. Good; laughing is good. 

\--

“He called me Lem.”

“He called me Lem!”

“That’s his name!”

“We gotta finish the bottle.”

\--

“One time he forgot his coat-”

Fero pushed himself up from where he was half-lying in Hella’s lap. “This one’s too easy, he always forgets his coat.”

“-so I wore it around my waist and waited for him to notice it and then he said Oh that’s fine I’m not that cold. It looks quite nice on you.”

“Oh gods, what an idiot.”

“He almost got hypothermia.”

“Got hypothermia? Two shots.”

They clinked their bottles as they drank.

\--

The moonlight was shining into Fero’s eyes but he didn’t want to move from where he was curled against her side. Hella breathed out slowly, Fero’s head bobbing with the movement of her chest.

“Saved my life.”

Fero squeezed his eyes closed for a moment before he spoke. “Saved my life.”

“Drink.”

\---

“Was the first person I saw in over ten years.”

“Trusted me to do good when I didn’t know if I could do good.”

Fero considered that for a moment, a task that was difficult considering how far ahead (or behind?) he was. Hella tipped her head back against the side of the bed, looking up at where Fero was lying. He tapped his fingers against her shoulder, which didn’t really help him think, but did feel nice to do.

“Who wins on this one?”

“Unfortunately,” said Hella, “I think that’s both of us.”

\---

Lem returned to their rooms much later than he had meant to, there had just been so much to discuss with the members of the Quill, so much background on both sides that they needed to go through before they could even get to the meeting topic at hand, he had so much to tell them both and-

He stopped in his tracks upon opening the door. Before him was Fero and Hella, sprawled together with three or four bottles of wine lain around them. Lem sighed. He was trying his best to be annoyed, but it was very hard to keep up as they both grinned up at him.

“Lem!” said Hella, “You’re back!”

“Lem, hello,” said Fero, waving at him and half-falling out of Hella’s lap, clutching at her shoulder to keep himself upright. “We definitely were not talking about you.”

Lem tilted his head to the side. “You were talking about me?”

“No! Definitely not, why would you get that impression!”

“You just said-? Nevermind. Uh, let’s get you to bed.”

Lem bent down to pull Fero to his feet and Fero climbed into Lem’s arms instead which, while not a new thing, had definitely not happened in a while, even without accounting for the fact that Fero and Lem has been separated for eight years. Fero’s fingers twisted in the fabric of his shirt, pulling himself in close. Hella giggled and Lem felt himself blush.

He cleared his throat. “Come on, bed time.”

Hella sighed, pulling herself up and leaning on his shoulders, making him stumble a little as he guided them both towards the bed. Fero laughed, bright and loud in the way Lem remembered his laugh being when they had first met.

Fero touched his face very delicately in the way only very drunk people can do, humming to himself.

Lem looked down at him. “Did you two have a good time together?”

Hella giggled again from where she was leaning against Lem’s back, her forehead touching the back of his neck. 

“We definitely weren’t talking about how awful of a friend you are,” Hella said, sleepily. 

Lem huffed a breath. “I’m carrying you both to bed! How could I not be a good friend!”

He dropped Fero on the bed perhaps a little more forcefully that he meant to. Fero didn’t seem to mind, his hands tugging almost absentmindedly at the hem of Lem’s shirt.

“You didn’t bring Hella coffee or tea once in eight years even when she brought you dinner every night,” said Fero, matter-of-factly.

Lem turned his head to frown in Hella’s general direction. “I didn’t know you needed me to bring you tea.”

“I didn’t need it, but it would’ve been nice…”

She broke off with a yawn, falling silent for so long that Lem thought she had just fallen asleep with her mouth open, her legs keeping her standing out of habit.

He eased her down beside Fero, a difficult task considering Fero didn’t seem to be able to let go of any part of him for longer than a second. Hella let out a deep breath, blinking up at him slowly.

Lem whispered to Fero. “I didn’t know she wanted me to bring her tea.”

“Dude, you’re just really dumb,” Fero whispered, but loudly. “Hella and I brought you lunch all those times because we love you and we want to take care of you, or whatever.”

Lem froze. “You love me?”

“Yeah,” said Hella, clumsily raising an arm to pat his cheek, “of course we do.”

“And when you don’t do anything for us back, it hurts, I guess,” continued Fero. “I don’t know. It feels like you don’t care about us as much as we care about you.”

“I- I love you both, too.”

“Yeah, no, sure you do,” Fero said, waving a hand. “It’s just hard to know that when you like, never do anything nice for us and sometimes leave us to sit in holding cells while you go investigate dead bodies or whatever else you do when you leave us alone.”

“Cause trouble,” mumbled Hella.

“Exactly!” said Fero.

Lem frowned. “I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“Did you even-” Fero yawned, “-think to ask?”

Lem shrugged, which seemed to have woken Hella up. Or woken her up more from the level of sleep she was in. Hella’s hands joined Fero’s in tugging at his shirt, pulling him down onto the bed, their bed, with them. She kissed his shoulder before drawing Fero back into the middle, both of them wiggling into each other.

Lem smiled, toeing off his boots and stretching out along Fero’s other side, his head almost resting against Hella’s shoulder. He fell asleep quickly for the first time in months.

 

\---

 

Hella woke up, her mouth feeling like sand and tasting like rotted fruit and grass. She turned to her left and her right, trying to figure out what had happened. Fero was next to her, still in bed, drinking a big glass of water. When he noticed her watching him he held it out to her.

“You got us water?” said Hella, taking a gulp of the water.

“No, it was here when I woke up.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah.” Fero paused. “Hey, do you remember going to bed?”

“No, I uh, don’t remember much except...” Her eyes widened in horror. “Hey Fero.”

“Yeah?”

“Last night did we both get really drunk and tell Lem we love him like fifty times.”

Fero hummed. “That doesn’t sound like us but... it is possible.”

Lem’s head popped around the doorframe, smiling and carrying a large tray.

“Good morning lovebirds,” Lem said, his cheerful sing-song voice matched by the shit-eating grin on his face.

Hella would have been annoyed, but Lem’s tongue was touching his tusks, a sign of Lem Nervousness. She exchanged a look with Fero, who shrugged.

Lem set the tray down with a flourish. “I have gotten you coffee and nice breakfast rolls.”

Hella handed Fero the empty water cup, since he always found it easier to speak with something in his hands and she definitely wasn’t going to be the one to start this conversation.

“Are you, uh, gonna make fun of us for the rest of the trip, because of, uh, what I said last night?” asked Fero, rolling the cup between his palms.

Lem let out a long breath, pouring Hella a cup of coffee and Fero a cup of tea. The curls of steam rose slowly from the mismatched cup into the morning air.

“Only because that's what you do,” said Lem, pouring a cup of tea for himself, kissing Fero on the cheek “when you love someone.”

**Author's Note:**

> big thanks to maddie @fangirl_squee for helping as always 
> 
> you can find me on twitter at @madeline_starr where i'm always tweeting abt boat party


End file.
